“The commodification of music is so complete that artists these days create songs thinking they would make a good car commercial,” Guccione says. “And they’re more fixated on their social-media strategy than they are on their music.”

“The problem now is that nobody’s blowing the lid off anything,” he says. And it’s not just music that’s in the ditch — it’s pop culture, too. “TV ads aimed at kids all have a perfectly diverse group of perfectly attractive people jumping up and down, appearing to be perfectly happy.”

This over-the-top political correctness, as he calls it, comes at a price. “It’s the exact opposite of rebellion and innovation,” he explains. And it has ceded so much control to Corporate America that even Occupy Wall Street was a joke: “There was no agenda there other than rich people are bad, and yoga is good. At the end of the day, how useful is that?”